THE CHARACTERICTICS OF NEW MEDIA

According to (Huhtamo, 2000; Manovich,2001; Schultz,2000) the followings are the characteristics of New Media:

• Digital

In a digital media process all input data are converted into numbers. In terms of communication and representational media this data usually takes the form of qualities such as light or sound or represented space which have already been coded into a cultural form (actually analogy). Such as written texts, graphs and diagrams, photographs, recorded moving images and etcetera.

These are then proceed and stored as a numbers and can be output in that form from online sources, digital disk, or memory drives to be decoded and received as screen displays, dispatched again through the telecommunication networks, or output as hard copy. This is in marked contrast analogy media where all input data is converted in to another physical object. Analogy refers to the way that the input data (reflected light from textured surface, the live sound of someone singing, the inscribed marks of someones handwriting)

• Interactivity

Since the early 1990s the term interactivity has been much debated and has undergone frequent redefinition. Most commentators have agreed that it is a concept that requires further definition if it is to have any analytical purchase. The concept also carries a strong ideological change as observed to declare a system interactive is to endorsed it with a magic power.

At the ideological level interactivity has been one of the key value added characteristic of new media. Where old media offered passive conception new media offer interactivity. Generally, the term stands for a more powerful sense of user engagement with media texts, a more independent relation to source of knowledge, individualized media use, and greater user choice. Such ideas about the value of interactivity have clearly drown upon the popular discourse of neo-liberalism which treats the user as, above all, a consumer. Neo-liberal societies aim to commodify all kinds of experience and offer more and more finely tuned degrees of choice to the consumer. People are seen as being able to make individualized life style choices from a never ending array of possibilities of offered by the market.

• Networked

During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the capitalist economies experienced recurring crises, caused by the rigidity of their centralized production systems. These crises is the profitability of the mass production of homogeneous commodities for mass consumer markets. In detail analyzes the shift from the modern to the post modern mode of production, the Marxist cultural geographer, David Harvey traced the manner in which these rigidities of centralized fordist economies were addressed.

• Virtual

Virtual worlds, spaces, objects, environments, realities, selves and identities, abound in dis-courses about new media. Indeed, in many of their applications, new media technologies produce virtualities while the term virtual is ready and frequently used with respect to our experience to our new digital media it is a difficult and complex term. In terms of new digital media people can identify a number ways in which the virtual is used.

• Hyper textual

This a clear links between the navigational exploitative and configured aspects interactivity and hyper textual. Also, like interactivity, hyper textual has ideological overtones and is another key term that has been used to mark off the novelty of the new media from the analogy media. Apart its reference to non sequential connections between all kinds of data facilitated by the computer in the early 1990s, the pursuit of literally hyper texts as novels and forms of non lineal fiction was much in evidence, becoming something of an artistic movement. Such literal hyper texts also attracted much attention from critics and theorists.

 BY  MWINYIJUMA REHEMA (BAPRM III - 42686).